Threadbare
by oh sailor
Summary: I've been pulled threadbare, and I'm ready to be thrown out with the trash. oneshot


Author's notes: I've been thinking about this story for several months, and I have written about 4 gazillion drafts of it before I was satisfied. It's about Lizzie, and kind of odd. I've worked very hard on it, reviews are greatly appreciated. This is inspired by the song "Behind these hazel eyes" by Kelly Clarkson and bits and pieces of myself.

Disclaimer: Lizzie McGuire me no own

All my life I've been the good girl. The sweet girl. The perfect girl. I never knew where I was going, or where I would end up, and I was perfectly content to roll with the tide and let life carry me wherever it wanted to. I let simple mindedness take over. I forgot how to make decisions. I forgot that things change. I forgot a lot of things.

The damn thing is, I still know that things weren't supposed to work out the way they did. When something happens to you that should have happened to someone else, you obsess over why fate chose you. I wasn't supposed to fall apart. I wasn't supposed to lose my fairy tale, to watch it all slip through my fingers and shatter on the floor.

Maybe it was supposed to be a slap in the face; reality's way of saying Wake up McGuire and smell the coffee. It didn't have to slap me quite as hard.

I've always been a clumsy girl. I'm clumsy with words, I'm clumsy with shoes. I'm clumsy with my friends. I was too clumsy, and I fell off of the high wire. Sorry Lizzie, too bad. You screwed up and now you're fired. You don't get a second chance.

And now I'm broken. And it's too late to return to who I was and what I wanted.

I suppose I had goals once. As a little girl, when everything was beautiful. When I still had Miranda and Gordo. Before I had a nervous breakdown. I wanted to be a princess, an angel, a cheerleader, a doctor, a fairy, a whole world. My goals changed constantly in middle school, and I couldn't understand how Gordo _always_ wanted to be a director and Miranda _always _wanted to be a singer. They were stuck in their dreams, while I ran blindly through mist to reach for something I didn't know was there. They were so calm and sure of themselves, while I was blundering Lizzie.

And so I stopped wanting anything and let myself drift. Middle school passed quickly, high school came. It wasn't an awakening, and I was still the child I had always been. I wasn't bright and popular and amazing. I was still drifting, only this time I couldn't pull myself out of the whirlpool that I had been clinging so desperately to.

I didn't know that everything was supposed to be different. But they where; oh, they where.

I've been slowly breaking down since freshman year. I got lost in high school, and if it wasn't for my class picture, you wouldn't know that Lizzie McGuire ever attended Hillridge high school. I didn't know what I wanted…I never knew what I wanted.

Freshman year was really where it all began. I know it's a lame excuse, but I was scared. And lost. And lonely. Miranda and Gordo where getting bored with me and my apathy for most things in life, and I was left to my own destruction. Who needed friends anyway? Parties where my life. I could be anyone I wanted to be, and no one needed to know who I was. And so the drugs started. They wore away at my body, slowly crumbling it into nothingness as I slipped into a permanent delirium of a constant high. I stole money, I borrowed money, I had sex for money. And all so I could have the high that I needed to get through the week.

My parents where scared of me. I was scared of me. I still searched for the child that I had been, waiting for her to come and fill the empty shell. I wanted to be Sweet Lizzie that wore frilly shirts and mini skirts. Not the girl with track marks on her arms and a burned up nose from doing too many drugs. Where what I had, had once been too little, now it was too much. I was overflowing the confines of my body and drifting away from everything that I knew.

Perfection has a limit, and I had reached it. I could no longer be what I wanted, I was a slave to what I couldn't have again.

I started going crazy sometime in the middle of my sophomore year. It came little by little, slowly eating away at my mind until I could scream. I was watching that beautiful entity that I had been break. There was nothing I could do about it.

My crowning moment was the time I shot up behind the gas station and passed out, far too gone to come back down. I woke up on a stranger's couch, someone else's mother stroking my hair. They had called my parents, and my mother came to get me, crying the whole way home. She didn't know what had happened to her little girl, the child who wore a unicorn sweater to seventh grade picture day and kissed her best friend on a rooftop. That child was dead and I was all that remained.

They tried to give me pills and therapists; I was sent away to some clinic in LA for seven months, but it did nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Just like me. All the fragments of emptiness were tearing up my heart and all I did at night was scream into my pillow. I stopped taking my meds as soon as I got back from the clinic, and that's when the nervous breakdown happened.

Everyone has moments where they feel like they're going crazy. When life is too heavy, and they just have to let go for a moment of peace. The horror of the clinic, the horror of my pills, my parents, my brother, myself, my abortion…it all came crashing down and I snapped. The police found me at about one in the morning, wandering around in shorts and a tank top in fifty degree weather. My medication once again became a daily ritual and I moved through life in a daze, not caring what people saw or who I was.

I'm a senior now, graduation is three days away and I don't think I'm going. The senior class is abuzz with plans for prom and college. Parties are being planned, suitcases are being packed. I haven't filled out a single application or bought a dress to wear for "the most important day of my life." My eighteenth birthday is coming up in one week, but I'm not doing anything special. It's supposed to be a huge celebration and yet I told my family not to get anything for me. It doesn't really matter anyway. I've been pulled threadbare, and I'm ready to be thrown out with the trash.

"Lizzie?" my mother calls from downstairs. She won't come into my room anymore, "Honey, we're going to take you to dinner, are you ready?"

I drag myself out of bed long enough to tell her to go to hell before hiding in my sanctuary. I lie completely still until I hear her sigh and tell Matt to get his things. The door shuts behind them, leaving me alone.

I stare out of my window, watching their car disappear into the darkness. A happy family without me. I press my forehead against the cold glass, watching as a familiar car crawls slowly up the street, pop music blaring from the speakers. It's Gordo, of course. I hate him. Fuck him and his perfect life. Miranda's in there too, I know. She always is. They are dating after all. Who knew that Lizzie would be the one left behind? That was supposed to be Miranda's job as the rebel of the group. I never stole lip gloss, or wanted to sneak into that movie. I never took more than one piece of free candy.

I turn away from the window, ready to bury myself in my blankets once again. I'm leaving Hillridge once and for all after graduation. I'll go to LA and waitress, try and support myself as bet I can. Maybe even reclaim my singing career. The IMVAS seem a million years ago, was it only four? Four years ago when I was still whole. When I wasn't scattered to the winds.

I'm not really insane anymore, but I'm pulled so tight that I want to go crazy. I want to be safe and loved and beautiful. I pull out my compact and stare at my thin, narrow face. My honey colored hair is still the same. It's the only thing that hasn't been completely altered since middle school ended and I was thrown out of the storm and into the hurricane. I'm cold down here, so cold, and the future looms up ahead of me like a shark's mouth. It's just waiting to swallow me whole.

I've been pulled threadbare, and I don't know who I am anymore.


End file.
